Drawn west by the Rockies, Dion Kelly stayed in Calgary for its thriving tech scene, part of a wave of founders transforming the city into North America’s fastest-growing innovation hub.
After completing a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Calgary, Kelly co-founded Possibility Neurotechnologies, which uses a non-invasive, brain-computer interface to help children with disabilities. The company was among the Top 10 startups showcased at Calgary Innovation Week, held between Nov. 3 and Nov. 6 (see the full list here).
“All my friends and family are still in Ontario, so nothing was keeping me here once I finished school,” she said. “But I really did think this was the best place to build our company, because of all the funding and the people.”
“We’re trying to get to roughly 50,000 jobs.”
Jennifer Lussier
Platform Calgary
Another of this year’s Top 10 startups is Symbiotic AI, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to improve treatment options for patients with heart disease. CEO and co-founder Arjun Puri, who is also originally from Ontario, said while he could build his company elsewhere, it would happen “at a much slower pace, over a much longer period of time.”
Puri said having an innovation hub at the University of Calgary, part of an expanding network of hubs across the city, allows startups like his to move faster toward commercialization and data access than those in other provinces.
“Traditionally, it’s pretty tough for startups, especially in the healthcare space, to be able to securely, responsibly, and ethically access patient data,” he said. “But because of governance and the layered model of innovation that we have, we are able to do research at the university and then transfer that IP to the company in order to commercialize it so that we can have benefits that actually go out to the social good.”
The goal is growth
Calgary’s tech sector has been surging in recent years.
Between 2021 and 2024, job numbers rose 61 percent, making it the fastest-growing tech talent market in North America and among the Top 50 in the world. A June report from Startup Genome says the city’s tech ecosystem has added $8.1 billion in value since 2021, a rate that outpaced the global average.
“Our target is to 10x the growth rate of the earliest stage [startups] by 2031, which means we’re trying to get to roughly 50,000 jobs,” said Jennifer Lussier, interim CEO of Platform Calgary, a non-profit hub with provincial and federal backing that supports the city’s tech industry. Lussier noted that the industry overall accounts for more than 60,000 jobs today.
The tech sector has been a part of the city for decades, but it was mainly centred around oil and gas. There was no unifying force until the early 2000s, when a group of entrepreneurial-minded folks decided they needed to start working together to better diversify the city’s and province’s economy.
Today, the local sector has expanded to include everything from FinTech to cleantech to robotics. Now in its 15th year, Calgary Innovation Week has grown alongside the city itself.
The first Launch Party was held in 2010. It was a single-night celebration of the Top 10 technology startups in Calgary that saw founders pitch their creations to investors and other entrepreneurs.
The group continued operating as Startup Calgary, a volunteer-driven non-profit that relied on grant funding for the first few years, then in 2015, Kari Gordon was hired as the first executive director.
“They were doing tech when tech wasn’t cool,” said Gordon, who is now a director at Creative Destruction Lab-Rockies.
“It attracted a community of people who didn’t know, I think, that they needed a community at the time.”
“They started with this grassroots initiative, gathering literally at bars, or you’d get a community hall someone gifted you, and they just built this group,” Gordon added. “It attracted a community of people who didn’t know, I think, that they needed a community at the time. They became a community, and then they became a movement.”
In 2017, Calgary Economic Development, a non-profit supported in part by the City of Calgary, took over the operations of Startup Calgary. The organization was merged into Platform Calgary in 2021, and in 2022, the Platform Innovation Centre was opened across from Calgary Central Library in the downtown core.
Working on a shoestring budget, Startup Calgary put on 90 events in Gordon’s first year. In 2025, Platform Calgary has already hosted more than 1,000.
Innovation Week is now four full days of seminars, master classes, and networking mixers with events hosted at offices, workspaces, and hubs across the city.
Patrick Lor, the managing partner at seed-stage capital firm Panache Ventures, contended the tech industry needs to continue improving and working with all levels of government to make Calgary and Alberta as desirable a place to live as possible.
“Government needs to set up the rules and environment for continued business success,” he said. “We have a new city council, and the most important message that I heard from our new city council is that they are there to facilitate conversations and to cooperate and work together as one team, with the provincial and federal government.”
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
Feature image courtesy Platform Calgary.